Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “Under your clothes?”

  “Yeah,” said Lan, surprised.

  “Where have you been, my dear? Since the purge?”

  “France.”

  “Nowhere else? Recently?”

  Lan glanced at Azrael. “Can’t think of anywhere special,” she said vaguely.

  The doctor nodded, accepting the lie but obviously not buying into it even for a penny. “Upset tum, you say?” she asked cheerfully, pulling Lan’s mouth open and shining the light down her gob.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Worse in the mornings,” Azrael said pointedly.

  “Huh-uh,” Lan said, annoyed.

  Dr. Warmblood merely nodded again and let her close her mouth. “Diarrhea?”

  Lan looked uncomfortably at the others in the room. “A bit loose, maybe.”

  “Headache? Joints ache? Feel heavy or unusually tired?”

  Lan shrugged and nodded. “All of that, sure. Comes and goes. Mostly I’m fine.”

  “Bruises? Rashes? Sores?”

  “A few,” said Lan, picking up her skirts to show some of the more presentable ones off.

  Dr. Warmblood immediately bent to have a better look. “Where’d you get them, lovey? Do you know?”

  “Sure I know, I…uh…jumped out of a car.”

  Azrael sighed and covered his eyes.

  “It wasn’t going very fast.”

  Dr. Warmblood nodded like that was a perfectly reasonable excuse. “But the worst has been the tum, yes?”

  “Yeah, but like I say, just off and on.”

  “And it wasn’t a problem for you in France?”

  “No, of course not. I’m no hothouse flower.”

  “Of course not.” Dr. Warmblood smiled at her, but it didn’t touch her eyes. “I’m going to draw a little blood, lovey. Not a lot, you’ll never miss it. Just want to have a wee peekaboo under the microscope. Dr. Deadhead, if you’d do the honors?”

  “Certainly, but I really don’t see—”

  “You will. Oh trust me, you will.”

  Lan lay back, resigned, and stuck her arm out. A needle was produced. She was swabbed, pinched, stuck, and bandaged.

  “Sit tight, babies,” Dr. Warmblood called, leaving. “This won’t take long at all. Dr. Deadhead? If you’ll come with me, please. You’ll want to see this.”

  The dead doctor gave Lan’s arm a reassuring pat and followed his colleague out.

  “All right,” said Lan, once they were alone. “What is it you think I’ve got?”

  “I think you know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Lan.”

  “I don’t!” she insisted, trying to laugh, but too prickly to really pull it off.

  He gazed at her for a long time, smiling but in a strange, sad-eyed way. Then he reached out without speaking and put his hand on her belly.

  She looked at it, at him, at it some more. Her heart lurched. “Oh bloody hell,” she heard herself say numbly. “No, not a chance.”

  “It’s all right, Lan.”

  “It’s not all right, because it’s not happening! It absolutely is not! You!” She bounced a fist off his chest and clapped both hands to her face. “You utter bastard! How could you do this to me?”

  One split brow rose. “I didn’t.”

  Her jaw dropped, then clenched tight. “If you say it isn’t yours, I’ll knock you on your ass, mate.”

  “I cannot sire children, Lan.”

  “How do you know?”

  The question seemed to take him aback. “I…I never have.”

  “What the hell does that prove?! How many times have you tried?”

  He had to stop and think about it. There was a clock on the wall. It ticked.

  “Seventeen thousand, four hundred and eleven.”

  It gave her pause, but only a short one. “It only takes once,” she insisted.

  The door opened. Dr. Deadhead looked in. His expression was not one of congratulations for a proud papa-to-be. “My lord.”

  Azrael tried to stroke her hair. She twisted away from him. He settled for squeezing her arm instead and went out.

  Lan sat on the bed, still hugging her stomach, which was now flipping around inside her. She was not pregnant. She couldn’t be. She’d been with no one in France, not even once, not even Henri on a cold night when the loneliness had her in hooks. The last man before Azrael had been on the way to Haven, now nearly two years ago. So it had to be his, if she was pregnant, which she wasn’t, because please dear God she could not be pregnant. She’d be a lousy mother. She had a foul mouth and loose morals and stabbed hairdressers with scissors. She should not have children. She shouldn’t even be allowed near them.

  Nothing was happening. The whole world had stopped. Only the clock on the wall was still working and the ticking was driving her mad.

  Lan slid off the bed and went to the door. Her heart hammering in her ears and her eyes, of all places, she gripped the latch and carefully, silently, opened it a crack. She listened.

  “…must have drunk the water or…or even just walked through,” the living doctor was saying. “It would have only taken a few days or even a few hours. There are places—huge blasts of land—along the path your lordship took here that will still be hot a hundred years from now, as I’m sure you knew.”

  “No,” said Azrael. At least, it had to be Azrael, but his voice was strange, hoarse and hollow. “No, I didn’t know. What…” A long silence followed, underscored by a leathery scraping sound—Azrael rubbing at his scars. “How…sick is she?”

  Sick? Oh, thank heavens, she was only sick. Lan sagged against the door, so relieved that at first the doctor’s words made no impact on her at all:

  “She’s dying.”

  “No.”

  Lan honestly wasn’t sure whether she said that or only heard it until Azrael said it again.

  “No.”

  “My lord—”

  “I say no. You…do something. Fetch my other consorts,” Azrael ordered in a stronger tone. “Give her blood. Drain every drop of them, if you must, but—”

  “That won’t help.”

  “What, then?” Azrael demanded, almost in a roar. A short silence, cut into pieces by the pounding of Lan’s heart. He said it again, softly. “What, then?”

  “My lord, I can do nothing.”

  “And you?”

  Lan could almost see Dr. Warmblood’s shrug. “I can send her off now, before it gets too bad.”

  “Unacceptable.”

  “All right,” Dr. Warmblood said evenly. “We’ll trot her ‘round to hospital and start treatments. A bit of blue dye and DTPA to collect some of the particles that might still be swimming around in her system. Potassium iodide, if there’s any to be found, to help clean it out of her thyroid. And while I’m doing that, you comb through and find everything, anything, that came in with her and get rid of it. Clothes, shoes, treasured photograph of her dear great-aunt Mavis, everything. If she came in a car, bury it. If she was with anyone, including your lordship, send them to me for decontamination.”

  “And this will cure her?”

  “No. But it’ll give her a few more weeks.”

  “Weeks?”

  “Maybe a month. No more than two…and you really don’t want her longer than that. Forgive me for being blunt, your lordship, but you need to understand exactly what you’re prolonging. Say we pull out all the stops for her. We can slow the progression and treat most of her symptoms. Her appetite should improve. She’ll put a little weight back on and that will help. Her hair will keep falling out, but it’s only hair, eh? She won’t feel too badly, that’s the important thing. The headaches and nausea will come and go, but overall, she’ll seem to improve. In the meantime, the tissues of her mouth, throat, stomach and bowels will continue to die and inevitably break down. That ‘sunburn’ you saw will come back with open sores that will suppurate and eventually slough off. She’ll bruise over nothing, just wake up with great black bruises over her whole c
hest or back or thigh and the blood will just sit there in her body and turn septic. She’ll bleed—”

  “Enough.”

  “She’ll bleed,” the doctor said, more firmly. “Her gums, her nose, her ears, her rectum. And the vomiting will get worse and worse until she’s sicking up her own stomach lining and shitting out her bowels.”

  “Enough!”

  “Yes,” Dr. Warmblood said softly. “It is enough. Believe me, it is. Even if this was forty years ago and she were in the best hospital in the world, it makes no difference. She was exposed to severe radiation and she is going to die. How soon and how badly is all you get to decide.”

  Lan opened the door.

  They all looked at her.

  Azrael was first to move, although he did no more than extend an arm toward her. “I did not know.”

  “Oh, I know,” she assured him, trying to smile. “How could you? It’s not the sort of thing you’d notice. Or Deimos or Serafina. I mean, I’m the one that should have figured it out. There were signs up all around the wall warning folk to keep out. I should have thought harder about why instead of looking at the pictures painted over them. And the dog died, you know. Phobos. That really should have been a clue. It was all there to see, if only…if only I’d known…”

  “If it’s any consolation, it wouldn’t have changed the final chapter any,” Dr. Warmblood broke in, not unsympathetically. “Sorry and all that, but it is what it is and it’s time to think about what you’re doing next.”

  “Begin the treatments,” Azrael ordered.

  “No,” said Lan.

  Azrael didn’t argue with her. He turned to the doctors instead. “Take her—”

  “I said, no. This is my life. I’m not going to die like that.” The word caught in her throat; she choked on it a little, then spat it up like a fishbone. “How can you want me to die like that?”

  The dead doctor caught the live one by the sleeve and towed her quickly back down the hall as Azrael came close and folded her into his arms and Lan was dying. She’d gone from pregnant to dying that fast. She had a month, maybe two. What a word that was, maybe. She had this giant maybe looming over her and she was going to spend it puking up blood and peeling off skin. Her hair would fall out, her teeth. She would wither and rot in her own skin and what was left at the end wouldn’t even be recognizable as human, let alone as Lan.

  “I won’t wait,” she said, almost steadily. “I won’t die like that. If you won’t do it, I’ll do it myself, but I won’t die like that.”

  “Lan, don’t talk this way.” He cupped her face between his rough hands and made her look at him. “Please, go with the doctors. Let them help you.”

  “They can’t help me, damn it! Weren’t you listening? It’s not helping if I’m only staying alive to get worse! Is that how you want me?” she demanded, pulling free of him and at once falling back against the wall, her shaking legs no longer enough to hold her. “You have to want the time you have. Is that what I’m supposed to want? Is that what you want for me?”

  His eyes flared, flames spitting out through the sockets, before their light died almost entirely away. “No.”

  “It’s not like…like there’s even a chance! If there was a chance, it would be different, but there’s not! Call me a coward, I don’t care! But I can’t…I can’t do this…” And just like that, she was crying. With each shuddering breath, she slipped further down the wall until she was on the floor, hugging onto her bent knees and pulling herself into a tighter knot, like death was something she could hide from if she was just small enough. “I can’t,” she sobbed as Azrael knelt before her and pulled her, resisting, against him. “Not for one lousy month!”

  “Give me this time, my Lan, I pray you.” He touched her arm, her cheek, her hair, and folded her into his arms. “And if you cannot give me all, then give me all you can. How can you leave me tonight? How, when I have had only hours back in your arms? We’re supposed to have…at least a little time.”

  She wanted to argue, but there were no arguments left to make. She could only shake her head, crying hard against his shoulder. Tears slipped from her skin to his and were lost in his scars.

  “I know you are afraid. I know. You fear the pain, the weakness. You fear the threshold of the unknown. But these are all so temporary, my Lan. Do not let the fear you feel tonight rob you of all your tomorrows. Remember…” His hand moved to her throat, tracing the scar there from end to end before gripping her chin and forcing her head back so that she had to look at him, see him. “Life is precious,” he murmured. “All the more when it is ending.”

  He kissed her. He tasted bitter. She wondered, did she?

  “Wait for rain. It’s a beautiful night, cool and clear. If you could only see it from here, you’d know you could never die under such a painted sky. Wait for rain.” He tried to smile. “It’s not a long wait in this accursed country, is it? And it has to rain, Lan. It has to rain as hard as it can before I let you leave me. Please. Say you’ll wait.”

  “For rain,” she whispered.

  He smoothed her tears away. “For rain.”

  She did not promise, but she lay her head against his shoulder and let him hold her. Whether that would be enough for the next maybe month, she didn’t know, but it was enough for now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The doctor took her to hospital and kept her there for days. She had to have shots. She had to take pills. She had to drink nasty drinks. And it did help, as far as that went. She stopped being sick in the mornings. Most mornings, anyway. The pain subsided. She slept better. She gained a little weight. The bruises she’d acquired escaping from her appointments first darkened, then faded…then darkened again. Her scrapes closed and opened, closed and opened, but never healed. Her hair kept falling out, so to prove it was only hair, Lan cut it all off and shaved it clean during her first unsupervised moment. Serafina lost her damn mind when she saw her, but Azrael merely cupped her naked head between his hands and kissed her cold scalp and took her home to bed.

  Back in the palace, her time passed in a restless blur of inactivity. She tried not to feel like she was waiting, but she was and every day that passed, no matter how spent, was gone forever. If she stayed in, she felt as though she’d wasted one of a precious store of days and the guilt was more than she could bear, but when she went out, her eyes could only see things in terms of the first or the last time she would ever see them, and the grief was as piercing as the guilt. There was nothing so mundane she could not feel its loss if she thought she might never have it again. Every dress she wore—even the hated blue dress with the itchy sleeves and squeezing corset—was every moment she’d ever had while wearing it. When the servants changed the linens, she thought, ‘I will never sleep on those sheets again,’ and cried like she thought she’d miss them, even if they were ugly. Meals were worst, because everything already tasted so wrong; she’d had her last lemon cake, her last lamb chop, even her last nasty cup of wine, and had never known it.

  She still saw the doctor every day, still had the shots and swallowed the pills, but they helped less and less as time went by. Inexorably, she went from having a few bad days to having a few good ones. Then her conditions for what made a ‘good’ day began to shift just so she could keep having them. There would always be pain, so the dull ache in her belly became her new normal and the cramps that only ripped through her now and then became her symptoms. As long as she didn’t have new bruises, the old ones didn’t count. When Azrael asked how she felt, she could tell him she was fine as long as she’d only been sick in the morning, and he believed her because it was the truth, by her new standards.

  She thought the hardest part would be dealing with the pity, but she met none. The dead lacked the capacity to feel much of anything and pity least of all. Even Serafina cared only about what the process of Lan’s dying was doing to her complexion and although she seemed peripherally aware that Lan had a good reason for all the rivers she was crying, she couldn�
�t quite mask her annoyance at having to repaint Lan’s face whenever she finished. The doctor was the only living person with whom Lan had any day-to-day contact and she expressed her sympathies best with a little bottle that had three pills in it, all different kinds. “Take them together,” was her compassionate advice. “Empty stomach is best, but if you’ve got to have a drink, have just the one so you don’t sick ‘em up again.”

  Lan put the bottle under the mattress on her side of the bed initially, then brought it out and set it on the nightstand, where it was the last thing she saw before sleep and the first thing she saw on waking. When the cramps clawed through her or she found a bruise she couldn’t account for or saw blood in the chamberpot, it comforted her to know the pills were there. On bad days, she liked to hold the bottle. On very bad days, she opened it and held the pills in her palm. At first, it was only for a second or two, just long enough to feel their little weight and smell their slight, medicinal smell. As her other comforts became harder to find, those stolen moments drew out into longer and longer spans of time, until inevitably, Azrael walked in on her.

  She could have palmed them. She didn’t. After a short, tense silence, he came over to the bed and sat beside her.

  “Is it dinnertime?” she asked listlessly, rolling pills beneath her fingertip. “I don’t think I can eat.”

  “It’s early yet. But it’s a fair afternoon. I thought you might like to have a walk with me.”

  “Is it sunny? The light…bothers me.”

  “No. It’s warm, but overcast. It may rain later.” He took her hand, curling her fingers into a protective shell over the pills before he kissed it. “Walk with me, before it comes.”

  So they walked, away from the palace and down along the riverfront as far as she could go before she had to rest. They watched the water as the sun sank behind the thickening clouds, then made careful love as the failing lights of Haven came on. The first drops fell on her back as she lay against him afterwards and, with his eyelight dim on her bare skin, she reached into the swaddles of her gown nearby and found the pill bottle.

  She held it loosely in her grip. He held her tight in his.